Abstract
In this paper, considering the fact that special forms of dying and killing are mostly seen in a shadowy zone or blurred boundary between life and death, I shall attempt to find a compromise between Michel Foucault (bio-politics) and Giorgio Agamben’s (thanatopolitics) considerations of biopolitics in the case of euthanasia. In this respect, believing that this article requires a historical backround, I shall start with a brief history of euthanasia and suicide in order to understand the present juridico-medico-political complex from which the sovereign power derives its philosophical underpinnings and theoretical justifications today; and show that the relationship power and death has always been very problematic. Secondly, I will focus on the meaning(s) of the disappearance of death in the context of Foucauldian biopolitics and conclude that, in contrast to Foucault’s consideration, something akin to re-discovery of death has taken place in the Western world since the mid-twentieth century. Finally, in the third and last part of the article, I will put forward that Agamben, by introducing the concept life unworthy of being lived, was successful in completing what is missing, that is the politics of death, in Foucault’s notion of biopolitics with reference to the problem of euthanasia.

The second-half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of various attempts at thinking the “disunity” of the sciences. They appeared as a reaction against the methodological monism fostered by the Vienna Circle that promoted the unity of science and therefore the validity of the project of a singular philosophy of science. Hence, from the end of the 1960s, the philosophy of biology affirmed the specificity of the living and, as a consequence, the obligation to move away from the standards of the philosophy of physics. In the following decade, there was an institutionalization of various philosophies of « the special sciences»: of biology, of geography, of medicine etc. Although these different philosophies are often seen as sub-disciplines of a general philosophy of science, this specialization also presented a challenge to the long tradition of affirming the unity of science based on physical-chemical reductionism.

Nevertheless, the positivist ideals of conceptual clarification and the purification of language are still central for these new philosophies. What is being criticized is therefore the “dogma” of the unity of science, not necessarily the positivist methodology. Among these criticisms, one can think of Paul Feyerabend, Jerry Fodor and the group of the so called “Stanford School” in philosophy of science (Nancy Cartwright, John Dupré, Peter Galison, Patrick Suppes and Ian Hacking), just to name a few. These critics emphasized the cultural and social aspects of the sciences and the importance of the history of science for the construction of a more elaborated and less abstract image of scientific practice. By criticizing the project of the unity of science, these authors have reworked some of the most central and traditional concepts of epistemology, such as that of “method” (Feyerabend 1975), thus coming to elaborate other concepts, such as that of “styles of scientific reasoning” (Crombie 1994; Hacking 1982, 1992), ultimately highlighting the pluralism of the sciences.

The question of the philosophical modalities of the disunity of science stands nowadays at the heart of the most recent epistemological reflections. This leads to the mobilizing of other categories, such as that of pluralism and regionalism, aiming at the same refusal of methodological monism. Pluralism, or the coexistence of various systems of knowledge within a given research domain, is a concept which currently holds a central place in Anglophone philosophical discussions (see the volume edited by P. Galison – D. J. Stump The Disunity of Science, 1995 and the most recent works of A. Arana, « Purity of Methods », 2011; H. Chang, Is Water H20. Evidence, Realism and Pluralism, 2012; S. Ruphy, Scientific pluralism reconsidered. A New Approach to the (Dis)Unity of Science, 2016; L. Soler, E. Trizio & A. Pickering (eds.), Science as it Could Have Been. Discussing the Contingency / Inevitability Problem, 2015).

This renewed centrality of the disunity of science should nevertheless not hide the fact that the “French” tradition of historical epistemology had already addressed this question and has produced various arguments, some of which are rather old, to support the disunity of science. Already Auguste Comte, who is at the origin of the French “tradition” of historical epistemology, proposed in his Cours de philosophie positive a subdivision of the sciences on the basis of their objects and their methods, fundamentally differing from one science to the other. According to Comte, a sharp dividing line runs between the sciences of brute facts and the sciences of organized facts. Similarly, each science has its own particular object of study that is approached with a method fitting that object. The plurality of the sources of scientific knowledge is therefore one of the defining traits of Comte’s post-positivism (R. Scharff 1995; Braunstein 2009), coupled with his attempt to base a philosophical study of the sciences upon their history.

The present workshop will discuss the extent to which, in more recent times, the concept of pluralism can be said to be echoed by the regionalism claimed in the interwar period by such philosophers as Gaston Bachelard. For Bachelard, it is not just a matter of affirming the plurality of the methods of inquiry, but also of acknowledging the specificity of the rational values characterizing each scientific domain. In this sense, reason organizes and applies itself differently according to the material domain where it is exerted; otherwise there would be no rational understanding of progress.
This concept of regionalism remained operative in the epistemology of Georges Canguilhem, according to whom “one can talk of science in the singular [only] as a cultural phenomenon” (Canguilhem 1965). In an interview with Alain Badiou, Canguilhem also underlined the difference between epistemology (in the French sense) and the philosophy of the sciences: whereas this latter is the equivalent of the Wissenschaftslehre and its aim is the “unification of knowledge, at least by its method”, epistemology is a “special or regional study”.

The problem of the disunity of the sciences has therefore been articulated in at least two sensibly different philosophical contexts: the anti-positivistic backlash started in the 1960s in the Anglo-Saxon world, and the tradition of historical epistemology which played a central role in France until the 1980s. The project of this workshop is in the first place that of comparing these two different ways of conceptualizing/coming to terms with the disunity thesis with the aim of assessing whether their proximity or their distance could help, on the one hand, to characterize them better and, on the other hand, to make novel research paths possible.

The theme of disunity is a transversal one that facilitates dialogue among researchers with different methodological backgrounds, working on very different scientific domains (physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, mathematics, etc.). We thus expect proposals rethinking the question of disunity on the basis of precise examples and of concrete case studies, mobilizing the largest possible spectrum of regions of knowledge. We also expect proposals on the history of the conceptions of pluralism and regionalism. Finally, particular attention will be given to those proposals investigating the originality of historical epistemology with respect to other methodological approaches also focusing on the disunity of the sciences.

Proposals (500 words plus a short presentation of the candidate) must be sent by 2018 February 12 (notification of acceptance or refusal by March 1st), in word or pdf formats, toepistemologiehistorique@gmail.com. Proposals by graduate students and early career researchers will be privileged. The languages of the workshop will be French and English.